Brennan’s Blog

There has been some IE7 bashing on Digg.com lately. Sure it can be fun, but the recent rants were just inaccurate. They were uninformed of the history or IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and the corrections which went into IE7. Some context is necessary here. Just consider that Netscape 4 was dominant when IE6 was released. The Javascript and CSS support in Netscape 4 was horrendous when you compare it to IE6, which stood still for 5 years. Given what we have managed to do with IE6 you have to give the IE6 developers some credit. Understanding the history and the recent changes will help you cope with the changes over the coming years.

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I had several tasks I wanted to complete on several of my personal projects which I had on hold while I was busy with other work the past few months. Over the break I was able to squeeze in time between driving around the state for family visits to knock of few of these tasks off my list.

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For a little bit of internet nostalgia, head over to the All your base are belong to us page over at Wikipedia. The video is still funny. More below...

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Many, many times in the past year I have had people email me about not being able to download a zip file from this site using Internet Explorer. It seems that once it is downloaded the file is corrupt and they cannot open it. This is very disappointing because I create these zip files with the zip file support built into Windows Explorer in WinXP SP2, yet IE has a problem with them.

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I occasionally use Meebo.com for chat. It is a website interface which works with MSN, Yahoo!, AOL IM, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. Today I found that they have a little widget you can add to your own website to allow people to chat with you. That is insanely cool! You can find it on the main page of my blog on the right sidebar.

The best part is that it is completely free. If someone wants to discuss something I posted to my blog they can just start a chat session right away. There is no need to drop me an email and wait for a response. Naturally I still want worthwhile submissions to be added as comments at the end of each blog entry so that everyone can benefit from the information, especially if it is about a technique or tool my blog entry did not cover. But when I do have a good chat with someone I can post a follow up blog entry to add the additional information.

[ Update: I have changed the sidebar to use a launch link instead to take up less space and allow people to move from page to page without losing the chat session. ]

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It is officially out tomorrow, but you can get it today. You can find it through a mirror. I got mine from California.

So far it has already caught a misspelled word for me and it seems so much faster. Now that IE7 and Firefox 2.0 are out, I am certain there will be some great articles comparing the two. What I hope to see is a standards compatibility checklist for both of these browsers. I want to know what JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML features they support and what is missing. I expect such a list will be posted at WaSP or QuirksMode.

Go get it.

When you log into a site using BBAuth it always redirects back to the public site configured with the Application ID. This presents a challenge when you are working with Visual Studio which allows you to fire up a local web server running on localhost. A typical website would appear here...

http://localhost:4675/Website/

Fortunately the authentication token provided as a query string back to the public site can be used locally. You just have to get it that far. You can copy and paste the query string from the public site to your local site, but that can get old quick. So I created a mechanism to allow you to start the login process on localhost and have the public site bring you back to it after a successful login.

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I have been working with BBAuth in an attempt to integrate various Yahoo services with my own ASP.NET 2.0 websites. Initially it appears that only Yahoo Photos, which has a new interface, is set up to work with BBAuth so far. It does not work with Flickr, Yahoo Groups, or other services. I hope and expect more services to be integrated with BBAuth very shortly.

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In ASP.NET you can access a database of browsers which will tell you their capabilities. It is called BrowserCaps. It is a hierarchical structure which general breaks down between Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Given that IE7 will soon be out, I questioned whether the BrowserCaps database needed to be adjusted. I got a response back from Shanku Niyogi that it should not need to be updated just yet. In fact, it is configured to recognize IE7 as the same as IE6 with the range of versions going from 5 to 9. You can see it for yourself in the following file.

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Browsers\ie.browser

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